Transcending the body

When the vicar, Sarah, arrived yesterday to see my grandmother and to say a prayer for her, she walked into the room and said “Oh, it doesn’t look like Dora.” Far from being an insensitive comment, it was tinged with tenderness and some surprise. Of course, she would have always seen my grandma at church dressed smartly in a skirt and navy blue blazer with court shoes, beautiful white hair perfectly curled–always immaculate. But her observation ran deeper than that, for me. There is something that, when it begins to fade, makes the person look less and less like